5 Best Thursday Columns

Timothy Garton Ash on Europe's Interest in Egypt's Future We have heard relatively little from the European Union regarding the crisis in Egypt, but Timothy Garton Ash at The Guardian points out
that it is Europe, not the U.S., that will be most affected by the
outcome. "The Arab arc of crisis, from Morocco to Jordan, is Europe's
near abroad," Ash explains. "As a result of decades of migration, the
young Arabs whom you seen chanting angrily on the streets of Cairo,
Tunis, and Amman already have cousins in Madrid, Paris and London." A
successful uprising with a peaceful outcome could lead to modernization
of these Arab countries, reducing the difference between life at home
and life in Europe and prompting more young Arabs to live abroad,
"contributing to European economies, and to paying the pensions of
rapidly aging European societies." But if the uprisings result in
further autocracy or Islamist rule, "then tens of millions of these
young men and women will carry their pathologies of frustration across
the sea, shaking Europe to its foundations." Whatever happens in the
coming weeks, Ash insists that "if Egypt's new or merely transitional
rulers--and those of Tunisia and other neighboring countries--are of
the kind that would welcome help from Europe, we must be ready to give
it."

Four Senators on the Merits of Health Care Reform Writing in Politico, Senators Ben
Cardin, Chuck Schumer, Sherrod Brown and Debbie Stabenow defend the Affordable Health Care Act. "We are not willing to allow a wholesale rollback of health care reform
that could take away popular benefits from American families, jeopardize
the health and well-being of millions and add more than a trillion
dollars to the deficit," the lawmakers write. Going segment by segment, the quartet outlines
why health care reform, which was recently declared unconstitutional by a
Florida judge, is a vital good. Among their reasons: it keeps seniors
from paying full freight on prescriptions by fixing a flawed Medicare
policy; it gives young adults breathing room by letting them stay on
their parents' insurance policies longer; it helps small businesses pool
insurance costs; and lastly, the senators say, the law forces insurance
companies to funnel money toward better care, not executive salaries.

Jesse Singal on the Failings of Academia Does college make people smarter? At The Boston Globe, Singal offers stories from three doctoral student
teachers who present a bleak picture of unprepared undergrads and overly sympathetic professors. "What they wrote, while anecdotal, should give shudders to
anyone who has ever paid a tuition bill or written a student-loan
check," Singal writes. One of them called her students' papers
"replete with sweeping generalizations and overly simplistic and overly
confident perspectives on complex issues," while another friend complained to
Singal that his students couldn't pick out a thesis in the writing of
others. Grading "easily," according to Singal's friend, is
"definitely the custom": one grad student recalls how a professor "said that 'the gentleman's C' is now 'the
gentleman's B,' and that the lowest grade that we would give out in the
class would be B-, in order to avoid angry phone calls from parents."

The National Review on the EPA's Overreach The editors at National Review back this week's proposed legislation by Sen. Jim Inhofe and
Rep. Fred Upton to overturn the EPA's right to regulate greenhouse
gases. The environmental agency isn't just out of control, they write, but
out of bounds. "The EPA here is acting indefensibly: It claims
authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions as pollution under the
Clean Air Act, which does not specify carbon dioxide as a pollutant, nor
establish a framework under which it reasonably could be found to be
one." On a micro level, the editors say, this amounts to steamrolling
Congress and Americans and placing costly restraints on businesses. On
the macro level, meanwhile, the EPA's manipulation of the Clean
Air Act renders the whole agency absurd, because "to whatever extent carbon dioxide
may be a problem, it is a global problem, beyond the scope of the Clean Air Act and beyond the jurisdiction of the EPA."

Gail Collins on Where Crazy Winter Weather Comes From Collins is puzzled by this winter's extreme weather and wants to blame it on someone. But who? Writing in The New York Times, Collins exhausts several options, among them Arnold Schwarzenegger, George W. Bush, President Obama, and even Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, whom she compares to a gopher. Finally Collins lands on Illinois Senator Mark Kirk, a former champion of environmentalism who now opposes the E.P.A. She refers to an interview with Greenwire in which Kirk defends his denial of climate change based on "the personal and political collapse" of Al Gore. "In other words, environmental warrior Al Gore is responsible for the weather, as well as the pathetic wimpiness of Mark Kirk," concludes Collins. "Let's just think of it as the Senator Kirk snowpocalypse."